Lake Monroe

Lake Monroe has made the Florida Men on Florida Man most spookiest locations list for 2024 - it's a list that I don't think Josh even knew about.

Lake Monroe is scary, but probably for reasons that you wouldn't associate with Halloween.

If you are not from Florida or even if you are, there is a certain aesthetic that everyone associates with our state. Pristine and Palm trees. It's on every postcard, every poster, every piece of merch. Shiny and palm trees.

Lake Monroe is one of the bodies of water that make up the St. John's waterway system. It's nestled between the cities of Sanford, Florida and Deltona, Florida. And if you visit Lake Monroe, it looks like every tourist destination in our state. Beautiful beaches, piers that go out into the water with lovely restaurants and fishing spots, tons of palm trees, literally looks just like everyone's dream Florida vacation destination.

But one thing about Lake Monroe stands out. If you were to drive over today, you would not find tourists swimming or locals fishing. You would actually find the lake eerily empty.

The reason why this beautiful destination is virtually a ghost town is twofold.

One reason is that Lake Monroe has more alligators than any other lake that size in the state of Florida. A professor at the University of Florida said that for every boat on Lake Monroe, there are over 100 alligators.

Now, if you were to ask a local about that statistic, they would tell you that they agree, but they don't care. Floridians have this weird blasé attitude towards alligators. And I get it. Even though they are prehistoric killing machines, Floridians are over-exposed to them and in general, we just don't care about their existence near us.

But the sheer amount of alligators in Lake Monroe is astounding.

To paint a picture about how dangerous it would be to swim in this lake, I'm going to share a headline that was covered on Tampa Bay News 9 a few months ago: "Florida man reaches into Lake to grab fish, loses his arm."

This gentleman was a local in Sanford, who was fishing off the pier in Lake Monroe. He catches a fish and reels it in and gets to the point where you have to lean over to grab the fish and pull it out of the water and when he does, an alligator takes his arm clean off.

On the surface that can sound like a normal Florida alligator attack but any Floridian will tell you that is extremely rare. For multiple reasons because alligators don't care about people, but especially in deeper water. If you ever hear about an alligator attack in Florida nine times out of 10 it's in shallow water. For an alligator to attack someone in deep water is actually quite insane.

But it isn't just the alligators that causes Lake Monroe to be so frightening. Remember earlier, I said there were two reasons Monroe was scary. Alligators being one - more alligators than any lake that size in our state. But the second reason is bull sharks.

It's estimated that for every three alligators in Lake Monroe there is one bull shark. Many local experts believe that it is in fact the bull sharks that are causing the mass evacuation from the areas around Lake Monroe.

So if you're like me and you hear that there are hundreds and by some estimations even thousands of bull sharks in a lake you start saying to yourself "well that doesn't make any sense."

But to really understand this phenomenon, we have to go back to a story that we covered this summer. So if you've listened to our show for at least a couple months, you remember that over the summer we talked about an increase in shark sightings at all of our Florida beaches.

And scientists are baffled as to where all these sharks came from. In a two week period in July there were 8000 shark sightings on the Gulf Coast alone. To put that in perspective in that same timeframe the year before there were less than 2000 sightings.

Scientists aren't sure why, but they're pretty certain of how Lake Monroe has gotten so many bull sharks. For whatever reason this summer sharks are funneling down the St. John's river, which feeds into Lake Monroe. Lake Monroe is so deep and so massive that it mirrors the conditions of the Gulf of Mexico.

So we don't know what is chasing the sharks out of the ocean and funneling them to Lake Monroe. But we do know that the result is now the lake that has the highest count of alligators in our state also has the highest count of bull sharks.

Depending on who you ask, this isn't a big big deal if you're fishing on a boat. But local authorities are saying that if you fish on Lake Monroe, you are fishing at your own risk because if you were to fall in, you would hypothetically be within 50 yards of at least one gator or one bull shark.

To make matters worse, even though we don't know what caused the bull sharks to leave the ocean from this summer and make their way to Lake Monroe, we do know that back-to-back hurricanes are keeping them there.

There is a saying that you may have heard if you grew up in Florida: If there's a body of water, no matter how big, you have to assume there's an alligator in there. That goes for lakes, rivers of water. You have to assume that something in it is ready to kill you.

Looking at the reports pouring out of the universities of our state, it's safe to say that Lake Monroe is statistically the most dangerous lake in Florida, but also one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world.